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Microsoft to Offer Free Online Storage
athloi writes "Microsoft Corp. is giving computer users up to 500 megabytes of online storage for their documents, music, photos and video. They're offering it to a select 5,000 test users for now, but will make it widely available later this summer. This move is the latest in a series by the previous large corporation we all loved to hate to compete with the newest large corporation we might hate and fear, Google."
GMail storage anyone? It lets you use your GMails many GB's of storage as a network drive. 500 fixed MB is pretty paltry in comparison...
And will be doing it for real shortly with Gdrive, which is apparently no longer a rumor.
My blog
"It's easier, when I want to store something, to GMail it to myself. They have over 5X this amount of storage..."
And a 20 megabyte attachment limit.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
www.omnidrive.com
Users get 1Gb free, and up to 50Gb is available if you want to pay.
Disclaimer: not a shill, just a happy beta tester.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
AOL's XDrive.com has been offering 5 GB for free about 6 months now.
Its against Goog policies to use file storage software and your can can be suspended.e r=43692
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answ
Meh, I spoke too fast.
I tried it. It sucks.
Nothing innovative, plain old technologies. You go to a page with 5 filename inputs, you select each file, you put them in folders, you share certain folders.
Screenshots:
* http://tinyurl.com/2vaa7e (main page)
* http://tinyurl.com/38fsb9 (uploading screen )
* http://tinyurl.com/2j53kp (folder with files)
It does not seem to be "mountable" either.
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
Yes, but you can only send emails that are a maximum of 20MB. I'd love to have to split up a bunch of archives in 20MB chunks...
That aside, the mere fact that nobody can be held liable for the lost of data and that backups are likely not made, I wouldn't feel bery comfortable with the data being there as a means of recovery.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Google is ahead of them, this is MS's response. Platypus and more on Platypus.
I'm not even someone who is a big Microsoft fan - this is posted from a Debian machine, and I personally concur with the politics of Debian.
On a side note, Bill Gates did not make money from being a "cheap penny pincher". He made money by entering a market where the only real costs of manufacture are the initial R&D. As he is able to "value price" a product at ~£200 (windows) that has a per-unit cost of only a few pence (cd, booklet, box), he is a billionaire.
I could very easily just mod you down (I have mod points) but I decided that the scale of your ignorance warranted a challenging post.
AOL's XDrive is available now and offers users 5Gb for free. It certainly makes 500Mb look paltry. And of course don't forget, the Microsoft offering will exclude Macintosh users. When they go to Microsoft Live they get told they are not running a supported browser. This just goes to show that Microsoft's real strategy is turf protection of their Operating System monopoly.
Mark S Twitter/AIM/Skype:ekivemark B: http://ekive.blogspot.com
I pay 7.99 a month for dream host, and I have 246 GB of data storage. Ok, I haven't actually tried to upload that much. Currently I have 1.5 gigs up there, but 246 GB is my quota. Why pay for something like .MAC when you can just get some shared hosting. You can use it as a website too. I'm surprised that more people don't have shared hosting plans. They are cheap, and provide you with a lot of features.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm not an "AOL user", but I do have an IM account. Signing up for AIM is the only requisite to get the space.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Xdrive.com by AOL? 5GB of free space. And software to map your xdrive as a network drive.
Windows makes a profit margin of more than 85 percent. To put this in personal terms, for every dollar you spent licensing the OS last year, Microsoft spent less than 15 cents on all Windows packaging, marketing, support, and, oh yeah, improving the product.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Gmail is currently at 2869MB, so that's almost 3GB.
Amen. I'm experimenting with S3 for backup (offsite backup, in additional to my optical media backups), but the upload time is killer. What scripts/program are you using for backup? I'm currently using JungleDisk because it looked like the best of OS X.
It's not for Windows Mobile either.
LiveDrive is one of the Vista features that slipped from the actual release. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Microsof t-confirms-Live-Drive-plans/0,130061733,139267189, 00.htm
Looks like the space they're offering has slipped a bit too. Still, size isn't important, is it guys?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Um, Taking a look at my account now, it's at 2869MB of storage and growing daily. (they actually have a ticker: mail.google.com ) I think you are thinking of when they first started?
Oh, by the way, Gmail is also available to everyone now too, without an invite.
I was going to mod on this story...
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Bullshit.
Again, I call bullshit. Yes, Dreamhost does oversell like crazy. They even admit to it!. But they actually will let you use all the bandwidth and disk you're given. All of it.
Right now, a quick look at my panel shows that I'm using 64.1GB of space (as of last measurement). This month, I've moved over 1TB of HTTP traffic alone (I've used another 20GB or so of FTP traffic). No black mercedes. No phonecalls. Not even a damn e-mail from Dreamhost.
As Dreamhost points out, the only usage-related issue they'll cut you off for is CPU usage. For serving static content (i.e. not PHP pages), Dreamhost actually kicks ass. They really will let you hit both your quotas. Sure, you won't be able to run the next iTunes Movie Store off one of their shared hosts, but you can actually use all the space and not get so much as an e-mailed warning.
The real litigious bastards...